The Life and Works of Goethe: With Sketches of His Age and Contemporaries was published by David Nutt in London in 1855, and it was an immediate triumph — praised by scholars for its accuracy and by general readers for its vivid narrative. Lewes had spent years preparing the book, traveling to Weimar to examine manuscripts, interviewing people who had known Goethe, and mastering the enormous body of German scholarship on the subject.
The biography’s achievement is twofold. First, it tells the story of Goethe’s life with narrative skill and psychological insight: from the childhood in Frankfurt through the Sturm und Drang period, the years at Weimar, the Italian journey, the friendship with Schiller, and the long productive old age. Lewes makes Goethe comprehensible to English readers without diminishing his strangeness — the combination of passionate feeling and classical detachment, of scientific curiosity and poetic genius, that makes Goethe unlike any English writer.
Second, it integrates biography with literary criticism: each major work (Werther, Wilhelm Meister, Faust, the lyrics, the scientific writings) receives detailed analysis within the context of the life that produced it. Lewes argues that Goethe’s works cannot be understood apart from his biography — that they are, in a profound sense, the record of his development — but he avoids the biographical fallacy of reducing art to autobiography.
Collecting The Life and Works of Goethe
First edition (David Nutt, London, 1855): Two volumes, cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, two volumes: $100–$300
- Later one-volume editions (Everyman’s, etc.): $10–$30